


Be wise as thou art cruel

by evil_whimsey



Category: xxxHoLic
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-11
Updated: 2012-05-11
Packaged: 2017-11-05 04:38:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/402517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evil_whimsey/pseuds/evil_whimsey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Doumeki and Watanuki and Sonnet 140 (Shakespeare).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Be wise as thou art cruel

**Author's Note:**

> This story presupposes an alternate timeline, assuming that the end of xxxHolic and all of Rou never happened. Instigated by discussion on LJ, with ophelietta, who is apparently my brilliant DouWata muse.

1.

_**...do not press  
My tongue-tied patience with too much disdain** _

 

"Don't--you have absolutely no cause to look at me like that. Like you would've done any better." Watanuki rankles and writhes under his hands, his eyes spitting sparks through slitted lids. All that's missing is a blinding yellow caution sign: DANGER! HIGH VOLTAGE PRESENT.

His shoulder jerks; the bandage gauze slips through Doumeki's fingers and under Doumeki's tongue the word sits, _idiot_ , with all the smooth round weight of a glass marble.

He doesn't need to drop it out, roll it from under his tongue and watch it crack on the bathroom tile. He can leave it, sublingual, stretching his cheeks and lips just enough that Watanuki can see its shape, the swelling curve of the unspoken word. He doesn't need to say what's already here between them: _idiot_ carved in the gash up Watanuki's white bony elbow, _idiot_ in the soaked scarlet ruin of Watanuki's shirt sleeve, _idiot_ in Watanuki's twitchy fidgeting; this is excruciating for him, knowing he's hauled off and done it again, knowing he forever fails to calculate, knowing he's a menace to himself and always will be, and thus will always rely on someone with at least a rudimentary concept of survival to patch him up.

Doumeki doesn't need to voice anything so obvious. All he needs to do is sit on this stool and dab iodine over Watanuki's wound, and wind the gauze with faultless precision from forearm to bicep, and stew in all his scorn and contempt for stupidity until....

"God will you _shut up_?"  
"Sit still," Doumeki answers.

"You're thinking at me. You know how much I detest that."

Doumeki gathers up the gauze roll, the scissors, tosses the iodine and blood-stained pads into the trash. He doesn't bother looking up. "Don't get the dressing wet."

 

**

 

2.

_**Lest sorrow lend me words, and words express...** _

 

Doumeki comes home from a faculty meeting to a blizzard of clothing erupting from the second-story window, to the lawn and walkway below.

He pauses and watches a white button-down shirt flutter down, arms collapsing like the wings of a dying bird. His white button-down shirt, to be specific. Followed by his gray trousers, a flurry of ties, and a navy sport coat. Judging by the piles already on the ground (socks, underpants, t-shirts, handkerchiefs), Watanuki had started with his chest of drawers and was now working through Doumeki's half of the closet, right to left.

He leaves the grocery bags and his satchel on the first stair and ascends in hopes of saving his formal wool hakama and kimono.

On reaching the bedroom doorway, he's greeted by a duffel bag square to the chest, knocking a breath out of him. People always look at Watanuki's tapering willowy frame, all those delicate lines held together by restless opposing tensions, and underestimate his throwing arm. Doumeki sets aside the duffel, eyes the trajectory of the dervish spinning across the room, and tries to judge what _he's_ been most recently guilty of underestimating.

His hakama and kimono are still neatly folded, resting in the precise center of the bedspread. Indicating Watanuki's rage is selective. It hasn't overcome his fundamental respect for ruinously expensive hand-made traditional clothing. Not that this is necessarily any advantage to Doumeki, it just means he won't have to face horrified stares at the dry cleaner's later.

Another sport coat out the window, followed by Doumeki's black cable-knit sweater. Watanuki's into the winter clothes now, and going by the whitening of his knuckles and the grinding tectonic set to his shoulders, he is just waiting for Doumeki's merest word to light him off, the Stage II booster rocket that will set their whole flat alight in a thunderous roar.

But those are Doumeki's underpants decorating the front sidewalk, and Doumeki feels no particular need to be obliging. So he props back against the door frame, crosses the tip of one shoe over the other, and folds his arms.

Soon enough, comes the scalding hiss of escaping steam. "I knew all along you were selfish. Spoiled. Self-entitled." Words punctuated by Doumeki's winter coat, a store-bought knit cap, a fistful of heavy socks gone aloft through the window. "You have always taken me for granted. You take everything for granted."

Asking the nature of Watanuki's grievance would be an amateur's mistake. This is Watanuki after all, who isn't setting aside Doumeki's formal obi because it's Doumeki's, but because the subtle embroidery is hand-dyed and hand-stitched silk and no doubt he has read every painstaking hour that went into it.

"Maybe this will teach you a lesson. Maybe you'll have the decency to warn her, before you ruin her life. Hah! What am I saying? It's a completely futile hope, you never learn anything. _Someone_ should warn her she's doomed."

Up to this point, Doumeki had been flipping through his mental catalogue of their previous fights, looking for context. The one about the toilet paper roll. The one about empty milk cartons in the fridge. The one about turning his socks right-side-out before they went in the laundry hamper. The one about getting handsy on the train. 

But with the mention of a _She_ , he understands they have left the comfortable territory of domestic friction for hitherto unexplored realms of batshit crazy.

He curls his tongue around the words: _You are the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen._ Rolling the shapes of syllables against his palate and the back of his teeth. Then he pushes off the wall and aims for the kitchen, to make tea.

When Watanuki eventually jitters into the kitchen, there is a cup for him on the table, and one wrong move could jostle loose the compressed steel springs Doumeki imagines between all Watanuki's bones and joints, sending them streaking toward a violent impact with the ceiling and all four walls. A joke could even be made about one of them losing an eye, but that's been done already, hasn't it.

"You're still here."  
Doumeki takes up the teapot and tops off his cup. "My name is on the lease, last I checked."

"So? What, you're not even going to deny it?"

In the last several minutes, Doumeki has taken the opportunity to observe, and from his observations, piece together the story behind this latest eruption. Note, the full bento sticking half-out of the kitchen rubbish bin. Note, Watanuki's house keys and train card, and the indigo-dyed furoshiki thrown to the floor. Note, two tickets to the Edo-Tokyo museum, now decorating the table as confetti.

And he knows, when Watanuki showed up to his office earlier, with a bento and museum tickets (to an exhibit Doumeki had just read about in the newspaper last Wednesday), exactly what Watanuki would have seen. But he refuses on principle, to meet insanity on its own terms.

"Hiroshi Fumiko is my thesis adviser. She's forty-five. Married. Eldest son just graduated high school." He pauses to sip his tea, tracing his fingertips over the satiny clean laminate of the kitchen table.

They'd found the table at a rummage sale. It was cheap, in dismal shape, but after they'd hauled it back to their flat, Watanuki had spent days working some obscure magic that made it look better than brand-new.

Doumeki has never once considered wanting a different kitchen table. He has less than zero desire to get up on a morning and sip his tea at anyone else's kitchen table. It is such a direct, simple, central fact of his existence which on reflection he should probably explain to Watanuki at some point. But not right now, because Watanuki has lost all contact with reason.

"Hiroshi-san also suffers rheumatoid arthritis. Which is why I helped her with her coat, and took her arm, and carried her bag today."

He can feel the silence curdling between them, after that. Watanuki doesn't sit down. He doesn't take the cup of tea Doumeki poured out for him; an invitation to join the land of rational people. He stands behind the chair opposite Doumeki, absolutely rigid, while Doumeki enjoys his civilized rational tea and surreptitiously strokes the tabletop, which has seen all their strengths and weaknesses by now.

 

**

 

3.

_**For if I should despair I should grow mad**_

 

When he's swimming up into the darkness behind his eyelids, Doumeki thinks _huh, so this is amnesia, then_. He hurts, quite a lot, but doesn't know why. And he's accustomed to pain, but normally he knows its cause; what came before, and where he's fetched up after, so this is rather novel.

But it also hurts, and maybe he should be paying attention to that.

"Why is he always doing unnecessary stupid things, I told him to _move_ , that doesn't mean 'jump in front of the thing with the fangs trying to kill us', they don't even sound the same, how can anyone be so willfully ignorant?"

He doesn't recognize the ceiling he's looking at, but he does know that voice. He could be dead, long rotted to dust in his grave, the universe collapsing in on its frozen core at the end of time, and he would always know that voice.

"I don't _ask_ him to do this, never once, I wouldn't, and he never, never pays attention to me, I could be talking to a big stupid fence post, I'd be better off talking to a fence post, at least a fence post doesn't--"

"Watanuki--"

"--throw itself at things with fangs, you don't really see a lot fence posts making such an effort to get themselves torn to _shreds_ \--"

"Watanuki," That Woman repeats. Doumeki sees the words like that in his head, capitalized: That Woman, so okay he knows her too, but the ceiling still doesn't make sense.

"God am I seriously that miserable to live with, that he'd rather just _die_ and leave a horrible mess, is that what goes through his head--?"

"Watanuki-kun. He's awake now."

The rant cracks off in a retching whimper that pierces straight through Doumeki's chest, so that just for a moment everything under his breastbone actually hurts worse than his head or anything else, and he has to get up, he needs to address this situation because Watanuki should never make that noise, especially not because of him.

"Stop it, don't you dare move, you colossal fool." Watanuki leans in and blocks the ceiling, all his taut hyper-elegant angles gone slack and jumbled, complexion pale to the point of translucence, like shoji paper stretched over the framework of his skeleton; one careless touch and he will tear.

Doumeki remembers something about yawning darkness and lots of perfectly enormous jagged teeth, a putrid stench and frantic shouting. He remembers holding his ground, because as long as that hungry monstrosity was fixed on him, Watanuki could still run. 

It all goes hazy after that, but he can infer. That if Watanuki is here, things are okay. If That Woman is here, things are perhaps not altogether splendid for Doumeki, but he's reasonably sure he's going to make it.

There is something he should clear up though, right away, because he knows Watanuki. "You are not making a wish."

Watanuki's eyelashes stutter, several times, very quickly. His hand on Doumeki's shoulder curls, not clenching because he's being careful, but his knuckles are still rucking up. His voice comes as a warm, soothing breath across Doumeki's forehead. "You. Do not. Get to tell me what to do."

"No wishes." Doumeki doesn't need to look around, he knows Watanuki's other hand is in reach, and finds his wrist, curling his fingers around those fragile little bones. Scaphoid, radius, ulna, pisiform, all present and reassuring in the cradle of Doumeki's palm. "I don't need it." 

One of Watanuki's eyes is deepest breathtaking blue, and the other is a piece of Doumeki's very own self. Doumeki got over being upset about that years ago, once he realized that Watanuki would never, not in a million years ever be able to lie to him.

"What you need is a _leash_ ," Watanuki says. And Doumeki knows he's sincere, but he also knows that Watanuki prefers to convey sincerity through sheer volume, only he's forgoing that right now because Doumeki's head hurts.

He appreciates Watanuki being so accommodating, but there is such a fine line between Watanuki accommodating and Watanuki shattering into pieces where he sits, and Doumeki would much prefer him on the safer side of that line.

"I want walnut prawns. With that white sauce."  
Watanuki's cheeks go a little firmer, more like flesh than frail paper. "I despair of you ever learning the proper seasons for food."

Disappointingly, Doumeki's collarbone is too stiff for his shrug to be anything but subtext. "I'm saving you the trouble of guessing. You're going to want to feed me something, after this. Just make it walnut prawns."

"What kind of lunatic throws himself in front of an _onryou_ for pity meals? Has it ever occurred to you that you are deeply, deeply disturbed?"

"What kind of lunatic doesn't run, when he has a perfect shot at it?" Doumeki answers.

Watanuki's eyes are flicking back and forth; checking Doumeki's pupils for concussion symptoms. "Imbecile," he pronounces, but it's mostly an afterthought. He isn't crackling, or quivering, or gesticulating like normal. Neither is he relaxing, or curving his spine and shoulders to gently fit the space at Doumeki's side; a much rarer manifestation of normal, but one that Doumeki wouldn't be at all averse to right now.

As it is, he senses they're in danger of Words Being Said, and in such fraught circumstances as this, Watanuki is terrible with Words. He works himself up to some painful critical mass, chokes them out with no regard to sense or syntax, and then simmers for days in grim guilt and questioned motives, whilst scrubbing their flat top to bottom with lots of small specialized brushes, ironing every stitch of clothing they own, and wrecking their monthly budget preparing outrageous bento for every single person he knows. 

The only way to head off this particular dismal phase, is for Doumeki to step in and say Words first, thus letting Watanuki off the hook. It isn't that he's much better at it than Watanuki, he just never feels the need to castigate himself over his shortcomings with these kinds of Words, later.

"Okay, look," he starts off. "I like the thing you did with the kitchen table."  
Watanuki angles his chin, the better to look askance at him.

"I mean it's our table. And I like that. I wouldn't want a different one."  
Now Watanuki peers at him, closely, pursing his mouth like when he's judging cabbage at the grocer's. He hasn't yet attempted to draw his wrist from Doumeki's loose grasp, however, which could be promising.

"You're concussed," he mentions. "I'm not sure concussed people should be talking."  
"But I thought of this before I was concussed," Doumeki points out reasonably. "A long time before. Ages."

"You thought about our kitchen table."  
"Yeah."  
"Our eleven-hundred Yen kitchen table. With the beat-up legs, and the rust falling all over the floor."

"You fixed that. And now it's fine, and we have our tea on it, together. We pay the bills on it. You put your dough on it, when you're baking stuff. And that time it snowed all day and the heater crapped out, we sat there and did the crossword puzzle."

Watanuki nods slowly in recollection. He's bent down to study Doumeki seriously; elbow propped on one knee, chin in his hand. "Okay, so. You like our dodgy secondhand kitchen table."  
"A lot," Doumeki agrees.

"You realize I will never ask your opinion on decorating, after this."  
Not that he ever has before, and that's not the issue anyway.

"I don't see the point," Doumeki explains. "Of sitting at that table by myself. I wouldn't want it by myself. And I don't see the point of any other table, with any other person. I wouldn't do it. I won't."

Watanuki shuts his eyes, quite determinedly. Doumeki lays patiently, watches him sort through it, watches all the sharp-edged words rolling around his mouth behind his tight-pressed lips. It's possible he's going to explode momentarily, but at least his skin looks like skin on a living person now, rather than a fleeting coalescence of mythical substances; starlight and moth dust and tears from the marble statue of a virgin saint. Some people go pale and faint under grave stress; Watanuki has a tendency to become somewhat unreal, drifting off toward realms of the intangible and causing Doumeki no end of fretting.

"If you're telling me to just--stop attracting monsters...." Watanuki finally bites out.  
"Of course not," Doumeki says, because he'd really rather save a loud healthy row for when they're both in proper shape for it.

"Then what, dammit?"

Doumeki slips a finger down Watanuki's wrist, to the tiny blue ridge where his pulse throbs. "I wouldn't change anything. That's what."

 

**

 

4.

_**Bear thine eyes straight, though thy proud heart go wide.** _

 

When Doumeki was sixteen years old, his Kyudo sensei assigned him to learn _yuki no metsuke_. Doumeki-san's form was good, he handled his bow well, Sensei said. But he would not make progress until he learned to discipline his gaze.

And thus, in accordance with the old phrase, Doumeki spent a lot of time watching snow. He sat on the front steps of the temple, straining to follow a single flake in a flurry. He stood in the doorway of Grandfather's storehouse, gazing through silent falling curtains of white-on-white. He perched on a freezing stone bench in the courtyard, looking up at the frosty dots spinning down into his eyelashes. When the weather wouldn't oblige, he stared at photographs and paintings until he'd memorized them. Until he could see that elusive single snowflake drifting down before him in the hallways at school, in the darkness above his bed at night, falling slowly over and over, above the empty seat across the train.

Like many lessons from Kyudo, _yuki no metsuke_ is useful in life, generally. The ability to fix his sight upon the still, quiet nature of infinity, where everyone around him sees only various forms of confusing chaos, often enough of their own making. 

Plus it did wonders for his shooting aim, which happened to actually save lives on occasion. All-in-all, it was a worthwhile lesson.

 

Doumeki thinks the world would be a far better place, if people were less catastrophically, suicidally stupid. Humanity being what it is, he understands it would be a futile hope, and he wouldn't even be troubled over it, if it weren't for Watanuki. Because Watanuki bleeds for people. 

Not too often physically (thank all the gods), but metaphorically, emotionally. In spite of what he frequently tells Doumeki, Watanuki does not actually comprehend the existence of lost causes. He is incapable of believing, even when faced with overwhelming evidence, that there could be anyone beyond his hope or aid.

And people love Watanuki for that, of course they do. Assuming they have any sense at all, people acquainted with Watanuki very quickly catch on to the staggering breadth and warmth of his heart. They accept all that he offers and adore him in return, but only the merest vanishing few of them have any concept of what that transaction means.

Which leads to situations like now: Doumeki waging war with his good moral upbringing and ingrained Buddhist compassion and all of fucking useless _zen_ , because all he wants, ever, in the entirety of the universe, is to kill a bitch.

It makes no difference that she's already dead. If he were capable, he would cheerfully raise her up and kill her again, though not before showing her Watanuki, the boy who smiled, and brought her lovingly prepared food and told her comforting things, and cared so much that her bargain with Yuuko would bring her happiness.

_"Look at him,"_ he would tell that dead customer. _"Look at what you have done. It wasn't enough for you to self-destruct, you just had to rip out pieces of him to take with you. Did you even notice, at the time? Did you ever see him at all? Do you even comprehend that what he gave you, you do not remotely deserve?"_

In such as case as this, Doumeki supposes it is fortunate that death is permanent. With nothing more to be done about the customer, he can turn his full attention to Watanuki, who is still going around curled in on himself, face like a bleeding open wound, as if she were still lying dead in his arms.

"Idiot," Doumeki murmurs, when he steers Watanuki to the kitchen table to try and feed him leftovers.

"You're ridiculous," he offers, guiding Watanuki out of the bath and patting him down with a warm towel.

In their bed, he leans back against the wall, folds Watanuki's elbows and knees into a blanket, wraps him up like an uncooked spring roll and draws him back against Doumeki's chest.

"I have never seen such a nuisance," he whispers, folding both arms around that tender broken shape. He sets his gaze outward, seeing their bedroom become an empty field, winter-pale and silent beneath the slow-drifting snow.

 

*****

 

[Full text of Sonnet 140](http://www.shakespeare-online.com/sonnets/140.html)


End file.
